You know the one-time Free-World West is either on the verge
of collapse or internal civil strife (probably war) when the governments
that are supposed to protect Freedom for their citizens promotes a Winter
Olympics in a nation dominated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – the perpetrators
of heinous Human Rights violations and also the originators of a global
pandemic (PROBABLY Plandemic) used internationally by Globalist-Marxists
to control people internationally.
I WON’T BE WATCHING ANYTHING CONNECTED TO CCP TYRANNY!
With the OBVIOUS backward motion of Western Freedom, I was
pleased to run into The
Christian Post’s exposé of the nefarious Chinese Communist
Party by cross posting Part Three in a series.
JRH 2/8/22
I need your generosity. PLEASE GIVE to overcome expenses:
Big Tech Censorship is pervasive – Share voluminously on
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China's Communist Party: A brief history
Members of the audience
stand and applaud Chinese President and Chairman of the Communist Party Xi
Jinping during his speech at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the
Communist Party at Tiananmen Square on July 1, 2021, in Beijing, China. | Kevin
Frayer/Getty Images
By Michael Gryboski,
Mainline Church Editor
FEBRUARY 05, 2022
Part 3 of The Christian Post's series on China's human
rights abuses under the spotlight of the Olympic Games details a brief history
of the Chinese Communist Party, its failed programs and crackdown on religious
communities. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
The People’s Republic of China continues to receive global
criticism as the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing kicked off Friday despite
concerns about the communist regime's human rights record.
The U.S. and other governments have announced diplomatic
boycotts, vowing not to send any diplomatic or official representation to the
2022 Winter Olympics in protest of the regime's “genocide and crimes against
humanity."
Additionally, religious freedom advocacy groups like Open
Doors USA have urged people to boycott watching the Olympics due to the
communist regime's ongoing persecution of Christians and other religious
groups, such as Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners.
But concerns about China hosting the Olympics are not new,
as there were similar calls for boycotts over Beijing hosting the Olympics in
2008. Human Rights Watch contended at the time that calls to improve
human rights conditions in advance of the 2008 Games went unmet despite having
seven years to deliver. In fact, the group warned that the country had rolled
back “some of the most basic rights enshrined in China’s constitution and
international law.”
Since it came to power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party
has been a source of controversy regarding its policies, both foreign and
domestic. Despite experiencing much backlash at home and abroad, the party maintains
a firm grip on the nation.
The following pages highlight how the CCP came to power
after World War II, some of its infamous atrocities and how it remains securely
in power.
In the 1930s, mainland China found itself divided between
three factions: the Japanese occupation military, the Nationalist Party and the
Chinese Communist Party.
After Japan withdrew at the end of World War II following a
brutal occupation, the Nationalists and the Communists fought a Civil War to
determine control of the nation.
On Oct. 1, 1949, following a military campaign that included
the taking of Peking (renamed Beijing), Communist leader Mao Zedong declared
the formation of the People’s Republic of China.
“The cost of the war was enormous. Official Communist
figures counted some 1.5 million dead and wounded among the People’s Liberation
Army. Some 600,000 Nationalists troops were killed in combat, while roughly
three times that many defected to the Communists,” noted Encyclopædia Britannica.
“Nearly 7 million Nationalist troops were captured during
four years of combat. Approximately 5 million civilians died as a result of
combat, famine and disease.”
Remnants of the Nationalist forces fled to the island of
Taiwan. Technically, the Civil War is still ongoing, as the two factions never signed an official treaty and mainland
China refuses to acknowledge Taiwanese independence.
Under the rule of Mao Zedong, Communist China experienced
major programs aimed at fundamentally changing the nation into a modern
Communist society.
Three infamous examples of the Communist leadership enacting
widespread social change are the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution
and the one-child policy.
The Great Leap Forward officially began in 1958, with the
name being used to describe the Second Five-Year Plan under the CCP; the first
having produced considerable economic growth.
The plan was to advance industrial growth, especially the
production of steel, among the communal rural areas of China while continuing
to grow food production.
However, the Great Leap Forward became what historian
Clayton D. Brown described as the worst famine in human history and one that
was “largely preventable.”
“The ironically titled Great Leap Forward was supposed to be
the spectacular culmination of Mao Zedong’s program for transforming China into
a Communist paradise,” wrote Brown for the Association for Asian
Studies.
“According to one study, China experienced some 1,828 major
famines in its long history, but what distinguishes the Great Leap Forward from
its predecessors are its cause, massive scope, and ongoing concealment.”
In 1966, a few years after the Great Leap Forward concluded,
Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, an effort to mobilize the nation’s youth
to revive revolutionary sentiment.
Young people formed paramilitary groups known as Red Guards
and violently targeted political leaders and others not seen as sufficiently
supporting Communist principles.
“The army soon forced many urban members of the Red Guards
into rural areas, where the movement declined. Amid the chaos, the Chinese
economy plummeted, with industrial production for 1968 dropping 12 percent
below that of 1966.”
Sophia C. Hart, visiting assistant professor of government
at the College of William and Mary, who specializes in Asian comparative
politics, told The Christian Post that approximately 30 million people died
in the Great Leap Forward, while around 400,000 died during the Cultural
Revolution. [Emphasis Blog Editor’s]
In 1979, three years after Mao's death, the CCP announced
that it was instituting a one-child policy to curb population growth.
A study published in 1999 by the peer-reviewed BMJ medical
journal concluded that while the policy “eased at least some of the pressures
on communities, state and the environment,” it also came with many downsides,
especially regarding sex discrimination.
“Faced with hard choices about overall numbers, the Chinese
girl child has once again become expendable. Too many girls, if not aborted,
face orphanages or second-class lives concealed from the world and with reduced
chances of schooling and health care,” explained
the researchers.
“China has one of the world’s highest rates of suicide of
women in the reproductive years. Increased pressure to produce the desired
child, and a perceived reduction in the value of females, can only have
exacerbated the problems of rural women.”
On New Year’s Day 2016, the policy was eased to allow
families to have two children, and, in response to a sharper than expected
population decline, the CCP announced plans last year to curb abortions.
As the Communist government cracked down on civil liberties,
a significant area of repression has been the treatment of Christians and other
religious communities.
Jonathan Dingler of ChinaAid, a Christian human rights
watchdog, told CP that freedom of religion “has always been a major concern in
China.”
“While there were times when certain areas were more
tolerant of Christianity, like Shenzhen near Hong Kong, persecution for all
religious groups has dramatically increased,” he said.
“A lot of how faith groups are being persecuted directly
stems from how the Chinese Communist Party dealt with Falun Gong practitioners
from 1999 and beyond.”
Dingler said that members of the Falun Gong movement “have
been abducted into labor camps, ‘re-educated,’ tortured and sometimes harvested
for organs.”
“We are seeing a lot of similarities between this and the
Uyghur crisis on a massive scale. Falun Gong practitioners, and now all other
faith groups, are generally charged with ‘subversion of state power’ or
‘inciting subversion of state power,’” Dingler added. [Blog Editor: Emphasis is
mine but note who the perceived enemies of Chinese Communism are vilified and
the current vilification being executed upon American Biblical Christians and
American Conservative-Patriots resisting the Dem-Marxist fundamental
transformation of American Culture.]
“This is the government's way of getting rid of
illegal religious leaders, which they initially did with Falun Gong.”
In May 1989, around 1 million Chinese, mostly students,
gathered at Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest, demanding greater
democratic representation.
Following weeks of demonstrations, the Chinese police and
military entered the Square in June of that year and violently dispersed the protests, resulting in
thousands of deaths.
An iconic image from the well-documented protest was of an
unknown figure commonly called “Tank Man,” who stood in front of a line of
tanks and eventually even climbed onto one of them.
Although the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests are probably the
most widely known demonstrations against Communist policies, others have taken
place since then.
Amnesty International China researcher Doriane Lau told CP
about other demonstrations, including the 1999 Falun Gong protest in Beijing,
the PX protest in 2011 over the presence of chemical factories in certain
regions, the “Jasmine Revolution” protests in 2011, labor
protests in 2012 and 2018, and protests against certain evictions in Beijing in
2017.
“Given the crackdown on the right to freedom of peaceful
assembly in China, a meaningful assessment of civil society movement/mass
movement would also include other more dispersed but widespread movements
online and offline,” explained Lau.
“They include the New Citizens' Movement since 2012, MeToo
movement, vaccine-scandal protests, protests related to food safety, and
migrant worker protests.”
Hart, of the College of William and Mary, told CP that China
has also seen many smaller protests among laborers “due to economic reform” as
well as “several serious Uyghur protests.”
“There were huge protests over the landslides triggered by
the Three Gorges Dam just prior to the start of the 2008 Olympics,” she added.
“Foreign media also was very critical due to restricted access to the internet.”
Nevertheless, Hart did not consider the various protests
comparable to the scale of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations.
An enduring power
Chinese President Xi
Jinping looks on before meeting Russian Presidential Chief of Staff Sergei
Ivanov at The Great Hall Of The People on March 25, 2016, in Beijing, China. | Reuters/Lintao
Zhang/Pool
Despite protests and social change programs that resulted in
millions of deaths, the Chinese Communist Party remains securely in power in
the world’s most populous nation with increasing global influence.
Hart believes that this endurance was due in large part to
“enormous economic growth,” saying that up until 2008, there was an
“approximate 10 percent rise in GDP.”
State-sponsored force is another factor, with many,
including Human Rights Watch, reporting an uptick in repression since President
Xi Jinping took power in 2013.
“It has arbitrarily detained human rights defenders and
lawyers, tightened control over civil society, media and the internet, and
deployed invasive mass surveillance technology,” noted the organization.
“The government imposes particularly heavy-handed control in
the ethnic minority regions of Xinjiang and Tibet. The government’s cultural
persecution and arbitrary detention of a million Uyghurs and other Turkic
Muslims since 2017 constitute crimes against humanity.”
HRW also noted that the CCP has been cracking down on the
freedoms of Hong Kong and “initially covered up the COVID-19 outbreak and later
hindered international efforts to investigate the virus’ origin.”
Dingler of ChinaAid told CP that Xi's “policy of
‘sinicization’ is one which makes the state-sanctioned religions more
acceptable to socialist ideals, effectively crippling them of any authentic
practice of their faith.”
“The Chinese Communist Party has a pretty tight grip on the
internet, evidenced by how they immediately took down tennis star Peng Shuai's
sexual assault allegation back in November,” he continued.
“They also heavily regulate their school system, so it
remains impossible to get two sides to one issue. Christians in China actually
take the risk of homeschooling their children instead of sending them to the
‘brainwashing centers.’”
Furthermore, according to The Associated Press, China was
previously expected to improve its human rights record by 2008 as part of the
agreement to host the Summer Olympics that year. But in 2022, such proposed
conditions were “all but absent."
“If anything, there’s a lot less pressure than 2008,” said
Amanda Shuman, a China researcher at the University of Freiburg, to the AP. “The Chinese government knows full well
that its global economic upper hand allows it to do whatever it wishes.”
© 2022 The Christian Post,
INC. All Rights Reserved.
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